Lauren Sell, the vice president of marketing and community services and Tom Fifield, a community manager at the OpenStack Foundation talked to Superuser TV at the OpenStack Summit Barcelona for what Sell said was the most popular question of the week: How is the Design Summit evolving?

How is the Design Summit evolving? What is the PTG, the Forum?

After the Barcelona Summit, around 70 percent of the Design Summit will be removed and put it into the Project Teams Gathering (PTG) that will be held two months before the Summit for heads down work among the different project teams. The first PTG will be held February 20-24, 2017 in Atlanta. Then at the Summit, starting with the Boston Summit in May 2017, the Forum will be where the strategic conversations with developers, users and operators will take place. It will be collaborative among the community, not developer led like the Design Summits have been previously.

When it comes to creating the schedule for the Forum, Fifield says representatives from the developer, user communities and working groups will be involved, and there will be three types of sessions: strategic discussions for cross community issues, cross project sessions with more emphasis on issues that affect both users and developers, and project-specific sessions that will talk about the recent release.

Who should attend?

Sell wanted to address the perception that developers would no longer be coming to the summit. Right now, developers are attending the Summit, as well as participating in midcycle events. Now, there will be focused work time at the PTG for developers and time for strategic conversations at the Forum among both developers and operators. Ideally, as many developers would attend both events, Sell says.

As for the people running OpenStack clouds, building applications on top of clouds and project managers, Fifield says they want them to interact with all of the developers at the Forum. We need skills from a variety of areas to achieve the open design aims, he says.

Meanwhile, there will still be an Operators mid-cycle, but there will no longer be Ops-dedicated sessions at the Forum. Instead, there will be sessions that are built by both developers and operators to merge the conversations that have previously happened separately at the Design Summits.

My company isn’t made of money. It was hard enough to convince them to send developers to one conference, let alone 4!

Allison Marie Price

Hi Michael,

There is a Travel Support Program for the OpenStack Summit, and the PTG will also have its own round of Travel Support as well. So, people that need to attend either event can apply for travel assistance to offset some of the costs.

User Resources

OpenStack Superuser is a publication built to chronicle the work of superusers, and their many accomplishments personally, professionally, and organizationally. The emphasis is on a blend of original journalism and user-generated content, ranging from technical to business-level issues with feature stories, case studies, tips and videos for OpenStack cloud architects and administrators.